All posts tagged: existential threat

Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car

Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car

Get ready for the EV election. Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux March 20, 2024, 6:32 PM ET The Biden administration earlier today issued a major new rule intended to spur the country’s electric-vehicle industry and slash future sales of new gas-powered cars. The rule is not a ban on gas cars, nor does it mandate electric-vehicle sales. It is a new emissions standard, requiring automakers to cut the average carbon emission of their fleets by nearly 50 percent by 2032. It would speed up the transformation of the car industry: The simplest way for automakers to cut emissions will likely be to shift more of their fleets to electric and hybrid models, and the Biden administration estimates that the rule would result in electric vehicles making up as much as half of all new cars sold by 2032. It also gives the country more of a chance of meeting the administration’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions in half by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050. The final rule is a less …

AI for the People, Courtesy of … Elon Musk?

AI for the People, Courtesy of … Elon Musk?

Yesterday afternoon, Elon Musk fired the latest shot in his feud with OpenAI: His new AI venture, xAI, now allows anyone to download and use the computer code for its flagship software. No fees, no restrictions, just Grok, a large language model that Musk has positioned against OpenAI’s GPT-4, the model powering the most advanced version of ChatGPT. Sharing Grok’s code is a thinly veiled provocation. Musk was one of OpenAI’s original backers. He left in 2018 and recently sued for breach of contract, arguing that the start-up and its CEO, Sam Altman, have betrayed the organization’s founding principles in pursuit of profit—transforming a utopian vision of technology that “benefits all of humanity”  into yet another opaque corporation. Musk has spent the past few weeks calling the secretive firm “ClosedAI.” It’s a mediocre zinger at best, but he does have a point. OpenAI does not share much about its inner workings, it added a “capped-profit” subsidiary in 2019 that expanded the company’s remit beyond the public interest, and it’s valued at $80 billion or more. …

How Manipulators Use Disgust to Hijack Our Brain

How Manipulators Use Disgust to Hijack Our Brain

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Disgust is an incredibly powerful negative emotion, capable of inducing vomiting, panic, and rage. The sound evolutionary reason for our experience of disgust is that it helped keep us alive—by making repellent the tastes, sights, smells, and other sensations associated with death, rottenness, or toxicity. So when your refrigerator smells wrong and, upon inspection, you find that the culprit is a piece of chicken that has gone south, you feel nauseated by something that just a week ago made your stomach growl with anticipation. And instead of eating the bad meat, you throw it out. An important part of the brain that helps govern this process is the insula, which works to keep us safe by alerting us to pathogens in our environment that might harm us. But if the insula is damaged, disgust can decrease or disappear. Scholars in 2016 showed this in an experiment involving patients with neurodegenerative diseases that affect the insula; …

Joe Biden calls Vladimir Putin a ‘crazy SOB’

Joe Biden calls Vladimir Putin a ‘crazy SOB’

Joe Biden has sparked a war of words with the Kremlin after he called Vladimir Putin a “crazy SOB” at a fundraiser. Speaking at an event in San Francisco, the president fired a barb at his Russian counterpart while discussing the effects of climate change. “This is the last existential threat. It is climate,” Mr Biden told donors in California. “We have a crazy SOB like that guy Putin and others and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is climate.” Ukraine-Russia war latest Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response: “Has Mr Putin ever used one crude word to address you? This has never happened. Therefore, I think that such vocabulary debases America itself.” He then called it a poor attempt to sound like a “Hollywood cowboy,” and added: “This is a disgrace for the country itself, I mean the United States.” It’s not the first time Mr Biden has sworn at opponents, with the president caught on microphone calling a Fox News reporter a “stupid son …

The Art of No Deal

The Art of No Deal

The Republicans who won’t take yes for an answer Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images February 6, 2024, 7 AM ET Sometimes, a negotiation produces a deal. Sometimes, a negotiation reveals the truth. Negotiators in the Senate have produced a draft agreement on immigration and asylum. The deal delivers on Republican priorities. It includes changes to federal law to discourage asylum seeking. It shuts down asylum processing altogether if too many people arrive at once. Those and other changes send a clear message to would-be immigrants: You’re going to find it a lot harder to enter the United States without authorization. Rethink your plans. The draft agreement offers little to nothing on major Democratic immigration priorities: no pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants, only the slightest increase in legal immigration. The Democrats traded away most of their own policy wish list. In return, they want an end to the mood of crisis at the border, plus emergency defense aid for Ukraine and Israel. Yet Republicans in the House seem determined to reject the draft agreement. …

Trump Will Suppress American History

Trump Will Suppress American History

This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee’s face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee’s severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes. Lee’s face was once part of a larger statue of the Confederate general that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was at the center of protests and counterprotests during the infamous “Unite the Right” rally there in 2017. The city had taken the statue down in 2021 and given it to a local Black-history museum. Once melted, the statue’s bronze would be repurposed into a new work of public art. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More As I contemplated Lee’s metal face glowing like a small sun in the dark universe of the workshop, I thought of the statement issued by former President …

The Atlantic’s Jan/Feb issue: Next Trump presidency

The Atlantic’s Jan/Feb issue: Next Trump presidency

Featuring two dozen Atlantic writers on how a second term could shatter norms with the courts, education, the military, foreign policy, immigration, abortion rights, science, gender December 4, 2023, 7:59 AM ET The next Trump presidency will be worse. A special issue of The Atlantic, launching today, warns of the grave and extreme consequences if former President Trump were to win in 2024––building an overwhelming case, across two dozen essays by Atlantic writers, that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. With each writer focusing on their subject area of expertise, the issue argues that assuming a second term would mirror the first is a mistake: The threats to democracy will be greater, as will the danger of authoritarianism and corruption. A second Trump presidency, the opening essay states, would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of those rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. The Atlantic has made covering persistent threats to democracy its top editorial priority. Editor …

A Warning About a Second Trump Term

A Warning About a Second Trump Term

Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?” Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check …

Trump Wants to Create a National University?

Trump Wants to Create a National University?

In his final annual address to Congress, George Washington was convinced that America needed new colleges. Two institutions in particular occupied his mind: a national university and a military academy. “The desirableness of both these institutions has so constantly increased with every new view I have taken of the subject that I can not omit the opportunity of once for all recalling your attention to them,” Washington said in his speech. He was among a minority of the Founders—including Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—who believed that such institutions were necessary to build national character. “The assembly to which I address myself,” Washington told members of Congress, “is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity and reputation.” Earlier this month, in an announcement that surprised both liberal and conservative observers of federal education policy, former President Donald Trump proposed his own sort of national university: the American Academy—a free, online institution intended to compete directly with the nation’s existing colleges. …

A Business Plan to Save Harvard

A Business Plan to Save Harvard

Keep the endowment. Spin off the university. Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty November 21, 2023, 7 AM ET Ethically and academically, 2023 has been a bad year for America’s most richly endowed university. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants. Major donors have mutinied after anti-Semitic incidents on campus. Can Harvard be saved? Here, I imagine some guidance from the university’s investment advisers.   Dear Board of Overseers, Harvard has been described as a hedge fund with a university attached. This is the literal truth. As endowment-fund managers, our core business is accumulating and growing enormous sums of our clients’ money: in Harvard’s case, $50 billion and rising. In the past, our university division has understood and accepted the primacy of our accumulate-and-grow mission. That’s why being connected to a wealthy donor enhances an applicant’s chance of admission to Harvard by a factor of nine. We can all take pride in the university’s strategic use of the admission of wealthy but otherwise unqualified students to bulk up our …